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Category: Home Automation

Yesterday, after moving my GitLab instance, I noticed that the public clone of my Home Assistant configurations was a bit stale, so I decided that it was time to refresh.

In so doing, I also discovered that I was a few releases behind (three, to be exact), and that those intervening releases included several breaking changes. Fortunately, updating my configurations to support Home Assistant 0.57.3 also resolved several longstanding bugs.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything new about my experiences with home automation, largely because I haven’t done anything new in a few months. I’ve been busy, and at the same time, things are working as expected, so I haven’t come up with new ideas to test or dreamt up something else to automate (much to my husband’s relief).

That said, I’ve been thinking about replacing our hacked Amazon Dash buttons with something purpose-built. While the hijacked buttons work well-enough, there’s a noticeable delay between button press and response, and their battery life is quite finite. Also, there’s only so much one can do with vinyl tape to make the Dash buttons less of an eyesore.

Enter Flic, one of the only “smart buttons” available right now, and the only one I’ve found that doesn’t require its own hub. Fortunately, they offer a Linux SDK, so I can associate the buttons with one of my Raspberry Pis, rather than a smartphone (alleviating a common complaint about the product). Since the SDK requires exclusive use of a device’s Bluetooth controller, I benefit from having two Pis, and this project is simplified because the Pi I intended to use with the Flic happens to be the one whose Bluetooth isn’t in use.

My first project is to configure the Flic button to toggle the lights on our Christmas Tree. The lights are connected to a SmartThings outlet, which turns up in our Home Assistant instance thanks to MQTT, but Home Assistant is only accessible to my husband and I, while any of our guests should be able to turn on the tree. 🎄

For quite some time, I avoided acquiring any Rasbperry Pis. I already have four VPS, and I genuinely wanted to avoid expanding the number of Linux instances I was responsible for. My hesitation was for good reason; less than a month after acquiring my first Pi 3, I found a reason to add a second to our home network.

To be clear, I’ve nothing against the Raspberry Pi; I simply knew that my addictive personality would compel me to find ever-more uses for the devices, compelling their multiplication.

In the month since I first posted about how I am using Home Assistant, I’ve made a number of improvements to my configuration. These changes were mostly focused around usability–removing clutter from the interface and simplifying the layout–without losing any functionality. Two changes in particular really simplified the default view, making our light groupings more manageable and less overwhelming.

As promised, I’m open-sourcing my Home Assistant configuration files. I benefitted greatly from the samples Home Assistant links to at https://home-assistant.io/cookbook/, and hope that by sharing these, others can similarly benefit.